Satan Worshipping Baseball Player Retires
BBTF's Newsblog Discussion :: Honolulu Star-Bulletin: After 15 seasons, 263 games, Truby done
The origins of the joke about Chris Truby being a Satan worshipper:
Chris Truby really refers to two separate running gags -- the Chris Truby Joke, and the Albert Belle Joke -- and is one of the Internet baseball community's longest-lived in-jokes.
The Chris Truby Joke is generally an allusion to Truby being a devil-worshipper, and usually comes up whenever Truby's name is mentioned.1. The Albert Belle Joke is a joke of the form: "I'm so sick of people like ________ and Albert Belle who ____________________." Posters fill in the blanks with whatever ballplayer and subject are at hand.
2. The whole thing originated on April 13, 2001 in the Usenet newsgroup rec.sport.baseball, when poster "Deckard" wrote:Baseball is losing fans because of players like Sheffield, Belle, and Thomas. And not because of their hitting...
They can no longer relate to assholes who bitch about their $10,000,000 paychecks.To which r.s.b regular Tom Nawrocki replied:
When did Albert Belle ever complain about how much he was getting paid? Talk about a lightning rod for fans' complaints.
If somebody like Chris Truby was accused of satanic dismemberment, it would take about a week before people started saying, "I'm so sick of all these ballplayers like Chris Truby and Albert Belle with all their satanic rituals and the dismemberment and everything."Nawrocki later maintained he didn't mean to single out Truby as an example, but rather that he wanted to illustrate his point about Belle by using a generic ballplayer to pair with him. But by then it was too late.
The details of Truby's background (starred at Damien HS in Honolulu), and the progression of "cursed" teams he has joined since Nawrocki's post -- 2002 Expos, 2002 Tigers, 2003 Devil Rays, 2004 Pirates, 2005 Royals, 2006 Pirates, 2007 Pirates -- superficially suggest satanic influence, or at least a propensity to descend into successively lower circles of hell. However, there is no evidence to indicate Truby is anything but a generic journeyman ballplayer.
(Almost no evidence, that is. "Chris Truby" is of course an anagram for "Bury Christ.")
The Damien High is no doubt a reference to Blessed Damien of Molokai, a Catholic priest who ministered to the residents of a leper colony, ultimately contracting and dying of the disease himself.